Partners in faith

The breakfast gathering at Trinity Church on Friday morning was devoted to an urgent mission of salvation.

The multicultural coalition gathered in the basement of the venerable Copley Square church wasn't out to save any souls, per se. What they hope to help save is another church.

They were there mostly because of the extraordinary force of the Rev. Hurman Hamilton, Roxbury Presbyterian's pastor, who has attacked rebuilding his church with the same zeal he has devoted to improving the neighborhood around it. Rebuilding the church, he said, would be a powerful symbol.

''It would be a symbol of what happens when people come together," he said.

Roxbury Presbyterian Church is a quiet pillar of the community, but a pillar that has been crumbling, literally, for two decades. Its Warren Street building is essentially unusable; the congregation now meets at Eliot Congregational Church. While the capital campaign has already raised $2 million, it is still $700,000 short of what it will cost to repair the building. This is because the original estimate significantly underestimated the damage of the building. No one realized, at first, how close the whole thing was to falling down.

Several years ago, Hamilton and his wife pledged $60,000 of their own money -- their life savings, basically -- to get the building campaign going. Former State Street Bank chairman Marshall Carter and his wife donated $300,000. Loyal church members have pledged and raised hundreds of thousands, with foundations kicking in some of the rest.

Now, fund-raisers associated with Trinity, Old South Church, and the Boston Fellowship are trying to raise the rest of the money -- ideally in time for the church to move into its restored quarters by July, allowing it to run its badly needed summer youth programs.

''The last $700,000 out of $2.7 million is always the hardest to raise," notes Jamie Bush of the Boston Fellowship. ''I don't think there's any question they'll get it raised, though."

Bush, the president's cousin, has forged a friendship with Hamilton and is impassioned about the potential for closer ties between black churches and the wider community. ''You have the black church ministering the suburbs," he said Friday after Hamilton spoke. ''If you'd said that would happen 10 or 15 years ago, people would have laughed at you."

Roxbury Presbyterian has a colorful history. It was a predominantly white church until the 1960s, when its demographics changed along with the neighborhood around it. The church was firebombed in the 1960s, Hamilton said, after one of his predecessors campaigned against more liquor stores in Roxbury.

But by the time Hamilton took over the pulpit about a decade ago, a feeling of decay was palpable. He was initially urged not to live in Roxbury, when he moved from Louisiana. ''Of course, I had to live in Roxbury," he said. ''This is what I was about. These were my people."

His first order of business was getting rid of the drug dealers who were peddling their wares on the porch of the church. He and his parishioners chased the dealers down the block, but they continued to pursue them. ''We weren't trying to run them out of the neighborhood," he said. ''We were trying to bring them into the church. We knew we had a story that would transform them."

Hamilton and his church have remained on the front lines. During a spate of violence last year, Roxbury Presbyterian played a leading role in getting churches involved in addressing crime.

The newfound collaboration between Roxbury Presbyterian and Trinity Church is partly the legacy of the Rev. Samuel Lloyd, until recently Trinity's rector. He got to know Hamilton and was determined to find a way to help him, a charge that has been taken up in his absence.

Trinity parishioners are quick to downplay their role. ''The big thing is how we connect with each other," Louise Packard said. ''What gets people to give is the personal connection. We aren't the story. The story is that if we got to know each other, this would be a different city."

Adrian Walker is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at walker@globe.com.